Catrice: feMALE Eye Aquarelle Duo Chalks Review

The Limited Edition feMALE collection was released by Catrice in the Netherlands very recently (and much earlier in its home country, Germany). As always, there's a whole concept behind each collection and as always, I haven't paid much attention to it (well, okay, okay, the gist: feMALE plays on the contrasting masculine looks vs feminine elegance, think androgyny yadda yadda yadda). Frankly, I'm really just interested in the products themselves. The four nail polishes didn't exactly excite me, so I gave them a miss.

These Eye Aquarelle Duo Chalks though were too different and cute to walk away from. Catrice calls them an innovation:

(excerpts)
".....the first chalk for your eyes!......the Eye Aquarelle Duo Chalks are fascinating with their unique chalk-like appearance with intensive color pigments and high coverage."

The Duo Chalks come in three variants and they all have hints of shimmer. As you can see in the swatches below, the pigmentation is fantastic. All swatches are with an eyeshadow base.

01 Love Me Gender
medium brown + peachy orange

02 Tomboy
khaki green grey + cornflower blue

03 Boys Are Back
mauve taupe + black grey

The very fine specks of shimmers are quite hard to make out but that last mentioned shade - black grey - appears to have tiny specks of teal. The following photo was taken with flash photography.

I guess the really interesting bit about these Aquarelle Duo Chalks is that each of the 'chalks' come in the form of a cube, nestled in a plastic cubic container (almost 2cm x 2cm x 1.5cm). If you turned one upside down and shook it, the 'chalk' cube would eventually fall out. The duos are not attached, which can be a good thing if you have more than one set. You can move the cubes around to form a different set of two (or three or four) colours. Cute that may be but I don't find the packaging terribly convenient to handle. They are so small in the hand and the cubes seem so fragile.

The chunky cubes do have a chalk-like appearance (as Catrice says) but the texture is very velvety smooth. I didn't find them that chalky as in, they are not as dry or powdery to the touch as conventional chalk. In fact, I find them quite moist and even though the cubes are on the fragile and slightly crumbly side, there was very little fallout during application.

Catrice also brought out the Eye Aquarelle Applicators that are supposed to be used with the Eye Chalks. At first, I thought they were very special applicators but I wasn't really impressed when I saw the real thing in the store. They looked like normal sponge-tip applicators. Good quality, perhaps, but nothing more. I didn't buy these. I've been able to manage with my own sponge-tip applicators and applying with fingers would work too.

I've been having fun using these Eye Chalks everyday for the past eight days. This is just one of the eye looks that I wore last week. I used:

What I did:
• mauve taupe of Boys Are Back in the inner V
• blue of Tomboy on moving lid
• khaki green grey of Tomboy in the outer V
• lined upper and lower lash line with Purple Stain eyeliner pencil
• tightlined with Black Ink eyeliner pencil
• applied two coats of mascara

Last Thoughts
If you have access to the feMALE collection, I'd recommend getting one or two of these Aquarelle Duo Chalks. Yes, they're cute and seem like a novelty, but you should get it because of its great pigmentation and if you happen to like the choice of shades. They are pretty much chunks of pressed eyeshadows with a fancy name, methinks.

I had wondered if any of the shades were similar to the eyeshadows in The Berlin Collection Palette from Catrice's Big City Life collection. Fortunately, there weren't any dupes (I'd rather not have doubles of the same shade). A couple seemed similar at first glance but the nuances could be noticed by comparing their swatches. For example, the taupes: one is more grey, another has more mauve and yet another is more brown. Anyway, my favourite of the three duos is Boys Are Back.

The price won't hurt your wallet much: only €2.99 per box/duo. The net weight of each cube: 0.12oz / 3.5g.

More information:
The list of ingredients for these Duo Chalks can be found here.
The feMALE collection on the Catrice website

@Atqa BeautyYou're right. In fact, I think the packaging for The Body Shop ones - four cubes in one container - is a lot easier to handle than these individual ones by Catrice. Well, if you have the former already, you probably won't need these chalk cubes then. :)